Wallowing in Turin

Cathryn Drake goes to Turin for ArtForum’s Scene & Herd column. While she was there she stopped by an art fair:

During a coffee break the next day at the opening of the sixteenth edition of Artissima, fair director Andrea Bellini looked surprisingly relaxed. “If you have style, you stay calm when the car accelerates,” he explained. “If you freak out, you don’t deserve the car.” He also reported that first-time exhibitor Friedrich Petzel had already been around and purchased at least seven works the night before. When I caught up later at the fair with the New York dealer, he said, “I am pleasantly surprised by the dry sense of humor in the work—none of this candy-colored crap. I saw so many things I liked—or maybe the fair is not so big, so you can actually see things.” (Petzel, of course, added that he was also happy with how much he had already sold.) “When I come to Turin I am like a pig in shit,” dealer Javier Peres gushed, bringing to mind the local advent of truffle season